Recently, there has been an increasing interest in energy storage technology. Electrochemical devices have been widely used as energy sources in the fields of cellular phones, camcorders, notebook computers, PCs and electric cars, resulting in intensive research and development into them. In this regard, electrochemical devices are one of the subjects of great interest. Particularly, development of rechargeable secondary batteries has been the focus of attention. Recently, research and development of such batteries are focused on the designs of new electrodes and batteries to improve capacity density and specific energy.
Among currently available secondary batteries, lithium secondary batteries developed in the early 1990's have drawn particular attention due to their advantages of higher operating voltages and much higher energy densities than conventional aqueous electrolyte-based batteries, for example, Ni-MH, Ni—Cd, and H2SO4-Pb batteries. However, such lithium ion batteries suffer from safety problems, such as fire and explosion, when encountered with the use of organic electrolytes and are disadvantageously complicated to fabricate. In attempts to overcome the disadvantages of lithium ion batteries, lithium ion polymer batteries have been developed as next-generation batteries. More research is still urgently needed to improve the relatively low capacities and insufficient low-temperature discharge capacities of lithium ion polymer batteries in comparison with lithium ion batteries.
Many companies have produced a variety of electrochemical devices with different safety characteristics. It is very important to evaluate and ensure the safety of such electrochemical devices. The most important consideration for safety is that operational failure or malfunction of electrochemical devices should not cause injury to users. For this purpose, regulatory guidelines strictly restrict potential dangers (such as fire and smoke emission) of electrochemical devices. Overheating of an electrochemical device may cause thermal runaway or a puncture of a separator may pose an increased risk of explosion. In particular, porous polyolefin substrates commonly used as separators for electrochemical devices undergo severe thermal shrinkage at a temperature of 100° C. or higher in view of their material characteristics and production processes including elongation. This thermal shrinkage behavior may cause a short circuit between a cathode and an anode.
In order to solve the above safety problems of electrochemical devices, a separator having a porous coating layer formed by combining inorganic particles and binder polymers has been proposed. However, in the conventional method for producing the separator, the porous coating layer was formed by coating a slurry containing a mixture of inorganic particles and binder polymers on a surface of the porous active material layer applied on an electrode plate. In this case, the binder polymers may be penetrated into the pores of the active material layer, thereby deteriorating the quality of an electrode. Also, there were still safety problems since the porous coating layer were not formed uniformly. In this regard, Korean Patent Application Publication No. 2008-0109237 described a method for manufacturing an electrode by first applying a solvent on an active material layer before forming a porous coating layer for the purpose of avoiding the pregnation of binder polymers. However, such a method still causes problems in that a density is decreased due to the application of the solvent and the formed surface is rough.